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The Muddy Truth About Kickstarter 'Staff Picks'
szczys writes: Crowd Funding is the wild-wild west of business financing, and it's not just the people starting campaigns that are playing without many rules. One of Kickstarter's sort algorithm triggers is the "Staff Pick." Research indicates being featured by Kickstarter staff is a huge predictor for success. But there is no published benchmark for how these are chosen. Oddly, Kickstarter only discourages users from falsely labeling their campaign as a Staff Pick. To protect backers and ensure the crowdfunding ecosystem isn't sullied by scammers, Kickstarter needs to boost their transparency starting with this Staff Pick conundrum.
When things are chosen by a "staff pick", the staff of a particular organization picks things they think look interesting. That's...the whole deal.
It's not a subjective process.
I think you mean it's not an objective process.
The problem with "staff picks," in general is that they aren't picked by the staff anymore. In the old days of indie music and book stores, the staff was typically comprised (at least partially) of people who were enthusiastic about the product being sold and the staff pick meant that a self-proclaimed expert really liked something. You could often trust these recommendations in the sense that the staff genuinely liked the things that they picked. Now it's a label used to trigger that nostalgia but the picks are now done by profit-maximizing algorithms and the staff has nothing to do with it.